Reliability: Enablers for Sustainment through Supportability Focused Design Influence

Summary & Conclusions: Supportability requirements and processes traditionally suffer from functional stovepipes that can inadvertently result in a negative impact to system readiness, availability, and life cycle cost. The challenge as program acquisition schedules become more aggressive, new technologies and processes are required to maintain the ability to complete trade studies to ensure a producible and supportable design. Reliability can provide a medium between design and sustainment with emphasis on supportability impacts by design decisions through analyses and metrics performed by the discipline. This case study highlights the multi-disciplinary collaboration approach by our Reliability team to identify and correct challenging or erroneous designs decisions early in the design process. The approach is demonstrated by focusing operational effectiveness through enhancement to methods in regards to people, processes and tools during EMD. The improvements resulted in the team's ability to reduce turnaround time on trade studies, increase awareness on risk reduction opportunities and cost avoidance on potential design changes and their impacts on the overall sustainment phase.